After 18 years, ESPN’s site not officially lives at ESPN.com. As Awful Announcing notes, previously that address would forward to ESPN.go.com — a throwback to Disney’s big push of the Go Network and moving all of its brands to Go.com. Additionally, we have discovered that Disney.com has also dropped the “.go” which other properties like sites for Disneyland and Walt Disney World both still retain the “.disney.go” extensions for now.
Over the years some have mocked the seemingly silly subdomain including this short article from The Onion posted in 2013:
In a merger of the two online sports news giants, top executives at ESPN.com announced Thursday that they have fully acquired and subsumed rival website ESPN.go.com. “The audience of ESPN.com and the audience of ESPN.go.com overlapped so much that this move made the most sense,” said ESPN.com vice president Kevin Jackson, explaining that fans will no longer have to check both websites for complete sports news coverage. “Obviously, getting the traffic that was going to ESPN.go.com is huge for us. But there’s also just a lot of mutual respect and admiration between our staff and the ESPN.go.com staff. We’re very excited to start working together.” With the blockbuster acquisition complete, ESPN.com will reportedly now set its sights on picking up one or both of www.espn.com and http://espn.com.
Currently, Go.com is simply a list of Disney-owned sites. We’ll see what happens with the Go Network next.